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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Guidelines for the Annotation and Visualization of Legal Argumentation Structures in Chinese Judicial Decisions

Authors:
Kun Chen↗Xianglei Liao↗Kaixue Fei↗Yi Xing↗Xinrui Li↗

This Guideline presents a systematic and operationalizable annotation framework for representing legal argumentation structures in judicial decisions. Grounded in theories of legal reasoning and argumentation, the framework aims to reveal the logical organization of judicial reasoning and provide a reliable foundation for computational analysis. At the element level, the Guideline distinguishes between the non-propositional layer and the propositional layer. The non-propositional layer consists of two elements: Issue and Non-argumentative Component. At the propositional level, the Guideline defines four proposition types: General Normative Judgment, Particular Normative Judgment, General Factual Judgment, and Particular Factual Judgment. At the relational level, five relation types are defined to represent argumentative structures: Support, Attack, Joint, Match, and Identity. These relations capture positive and negative argumentative connections, conjunctive reasoning structures, correspondences between legal norms and case facts, and identity or semantic equivalence between propositions. The Guideline further specifies formal representation rules and visualization conventions for both basic and nested structures, enabling consistent visualization of complex argumentation patterns. In addition, it establishes a standardized annotation workflow and consistency control mechanisms to ensure the reproducibility and reliability of annotated data. By providing a clear conceptual model, formal representation rules, and practical annotation procedures, this Guideline supports large-scale analysis of judicial reasoning and future research in legal argument mining, computational modeling of legal reasoning, and AI-assisted legal analysis.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research

Authors:
Zhibang Yang↗Xinke Jiang↗Yuzhen Xiao↗Ruizhe Zhang↗Yue Fang↗XinFei Wan↗Zhengxing Song↗Yuxuan Liu↗Yuheng Huang↗Xu Chu↗Junfeng Zhao↗Yasha Wang↗…

arXiv:2606.20122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.

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03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

When Less Is Not More: DICEPro Mitigates the Impact of Incomplete Reference Matrices on Cellular Frequency Deconvolution.

Authors:
BA↗Thiebaut↗Hinaut↗Hejblum↗B. P↗

Cellular deconvolution aims to estimate the frequencies of different cell populations from gene expression measurements in a biological sample. Supervised approaches, such as CIBERSORTx and DISSECT, critically depend on the reference signature matrix, which encodes the gene expression profiles of cell-types based on prior knowledge. Despite numerous deconvolution methods, the impact of missing cell populations in the reference matrix remains understudied. Here, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art deconvolution approaches using simulations based on real dataset examples combined with statistical modeling, validated against published data, and multiple real benchmark datasets. Results show that deconvolution performance remains stable when the reference matrix includes most cell-types, but declines sharply as the matrix becomes incomplete, especially for abundant cell populations. To address the limitations of incomplete reference matrices, we introduce DICEPro, an optimization-based framework designed to enhance existing deconvolution methods. By systematically adjusting the reference signatures, DICEPro better accounts for missing or underrepresented cell populations, leading to improved precision and robustness. We show that DICEPro consistently boosts deconvolution performance across both simulated datasets, derived from real data examples, and multiple real biological datasets, offering a practical solution when standard methods are hindered by incomplete references.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MaineCoon: Pursuing A Real-Time Audio-Visual Social World Model

Authors:
Lichen Bai↗Tianhao Zhang↗Shitong Shao↗Dingwei Tan↗Qiyu Zhong↗Zhengpeng Xie↗Haopeng Li↗Qinghao Huang↗Dandan Shen↗Tengjiao Ji↗Wei Wang↗Peicheng Wu↗…

As an increasing majority of global video content is consumed on social platforms for interactive social purposes, video generation models built for social worlds are important but largely overlooked by previous studies. In this work, we define the position of social world models and build a prototype model as the first step towards this goal. While previous world models successfully simulate physical environments or gaming world exploration, they remain fundamentally detached from human-centric social dynamics. To bridge this gap as the first step to social world models, we present MaineCoon, the first real-time audio-visual autoregressive model that has 22B parameters and is capable of real-time streaming generation and sub-second interaction, with a record-breaking frame rate of up to 47.5 FPS, on a single GPU. To the best of our knowledge, MaineCoon is also the first real-time audio-visual generation model specifically optimized for social-interactive applications. To enable efficient and stable training, we introduce several novel techniques into MaineCoon, including self-resampling, cross-modal representation alignment, domain-aware preference optimization, and reinforced online-policy distillation (ROPD). We also design the first agentic streaming inference framework that supports thousand-second-scale or even longer generation while mitigating drift with agentic cache management and prompt planing. These innovations significantly accelerate training while optimizing real-time inference performance. We believe this work not only sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance benchmark for high-quality, low-latency, and long-horizon audio-visual autoregressive models, but also points out the paradigm shift desired for next-generation AI-native social platforms.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DisjunctiveNet: Neural Symbolic Learning via Differentiable Convexified Optimization Layers

Authors:
Shraman Pal↗Can Li↗

arXiv:2605.30456v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many learning tasks in science and engineering are characterized by sparse datasets, which limits the effectiveness of purely data-driven approaches. At the same time, these problems are often accompanied by rich domain knowledge derived from physical laws, operational requirements, and expert heuristics. Such knowledge is frequently expressed as rules involving logical propositions and linear inequalities. Existing neuro-symbolic methods typically enforce these rules approximately through soft penalties, assume input-independent rules when designing specialized architectures, or rely on non-differentiable post-processing at inference time to achieve hard constraint satisfaction. While recent advances in differentiable optimization layers enable end-to-end feasibility enforcement within neural networks, extending these approaches to logical or mixed-integer rules remains challenging due to inherent nonconvexity. In this work, we propose a unified end-to-end framework for enforcing hard, input-dependent mixed integer linear constraints within neural networks. Our approach represents rules as disjunctive constraints and applies hierarchical convex relaxations to obtain convex hull formulations. These relaxations yield tractable linear constraints that can be embedded as differentiable optimization layers while enabling exact rule satisfaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on real-world datasets, achieving perfect rule satisfaction and strong predictive performance.

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06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots

Authors:
Khurram Javed↗Joseph Modayil↗Gloria Kennickell↗Richard S. Sutton↗John Carmack↗

arXiv:2606.19357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We built a robot called the Robotroller that actuates an Atari CX40+ controller and a device called the Atari Devbox that renders the game frame and the reward signal from the Arcade Learning Environment on a screen. The Robotroller and the Atari Devbox, together with an off-the-shelf camera and a desktop computer, constitute a system that can be used to study reinforcement learning algorithms in the physical world. We call the full system Physical Atari. In this paper, we detail the key decisions that make Physical Atari a robust and accessible platform. To make the system robust, we designed the Robotroller so that all movement is done through bearings, which reduces wear. Additionally, we wrote software that monitors the state of the servos at a high frequency and intervenes to limit stress. To make the system accessible, we used affordable off-the-shelf components and parts that can be manufactured using consumer 3D printers. Physical Atari can be built for under $1,000 and has been used for weeks of non-stop reinforcement learning experiments without any mechanical failures. We used it to validate that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn directly on robots and show that even small distribution shifts between learning and deployment can significantly degrade the performance of policies. Our results underscore the importance of on-device adaptation for strong performance on robots.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Information Lattice Learning as Probabilistic Graphical Model Structure Learning

Authors:
Haizi Yu↗Lav R. Varshney↗

arXiv:2606.19366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information lattice learning (ILL) learns interpretable rules of a signal by alternately projecting the signal onto a partition lattice that encodes a hierarchy of abstractions and lifting selected rules back to the signal domain. When the signal is a probability mass function, we show the probabilistic rules learned by ILL admit a natural probabilistic graphical model (PGM) interpretation and develop this interpretation in detail. A partition in ILL induces a deterministic quotient variable, and a rule is the marginal law of that quotient variable. A rule set is therefore a collection of marginal constraints over interpretable abstractions. General lifting is the feasible family of all joint distributions satisfying those constraints, while special lifting chooses a maximum-ignorance reconstruction, implemented in ILL by an L2 uniformity principle closely related to maximum entropy. Under a Shannon-entropy lifting, the same constraints yield a log-linear factor graph whose factors are indexed by learned abstractions. The information lattice itself, however, is not a Bayesian network: its edges encode refinement and coarsening of abstractions, not conditional dependence. Thus ILL is best viewed as structure learning for interpretable constraint-based factor graphs over quotient variables. This view clarifies how ILL relates to graphical models and maximum entropy models, while suggesting new directions for inference, identifiability, and hybrid symbolic-probabilistic learning.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Frozen elephant trunk repair in heritable thoracic aortic disease: Impact of genetic aortopathy on long-term outcomes - A multicenter analysis

Authors:
Berger↗Peterss↗Pitts↗Kempfert↗Nucera↗Yildiz↗Holubec↗Haas↗Czerny↗Kreibich↗Kletzer↗Discher↗…

Aims This multicenter study aims to compare outcomes of total aortic arch replacement (TAR) using the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique in patients with and without heritable thoracic aortic disease (HTAD) and to assess whether HTAD influences postprocedural adverse aortic events (AAEs). Methods From 06/2007 to 05/2024, aortic databases from 13 European centers were screened for HTAD patients undergoing TAR with FET. All consecutive dissection and aneurysm non-HTAD patients from the four core centers served as comparator. The primary outcome was AAE, a composite of diameter progression, distal stent graft induced new entry (dSINE), malperfusion, rupture and pseudoaneurysm at 5 years after FET implantation. Results Of 2739 FET patients, 196 (7.2%) were diagnosed with HTAD. The control group consisted of 867 non-HTAD FET patients. Marfan syndrome was the most common condition (72%), followed by Loeys-Dietz syndrome (11%), vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (5.6%) and Turner syndrome (2.0%). Seventeen (8.8%) patients were diagnosed with ns-HTAD. At 5 years 46 (24%) AAEs occurred in the HTAD group, 169 (20%) in the non-HTAD group (p=0.2). Diameter progression was the most common event (10% vs. 12%; p=0.6), followed by dSINE (5.8% vs. 4.5%; p=0.5), malperfusion (4.2% vs. 3.3%; p=0.5), rupture (2.1% vs. 0.7%; p=0.09) and pseudoaneurysm (0.5% vs. 0.2%; p=0.5). Conclusions The FET technique appears safe and effective for acute and chronic aortic disease in HTAD patients, with outcomes comparable to non-HTAD cases and no increase in graft-related complications, challenging traditional concerns about stent graft use in genetically mediated aortic disease.

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09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Uniform integrability of the distance to the nearest leaf in random trees

Authors:
V\'ictor J. Maci\'a↗Benedikt Stufler↗

arXiv:2606.15339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the distance from the root to the nearest leaf, the analogous quantity for a uniformly chosen vertex, and its protection number, in size-conditioned simply generated trees. We prove a uniform exponential tail bound for each of these quantities, valid for arbitrary offspring distributions. As a consequence, these random variables are uniformly integrable of every order. This yields convergence of all moments to those of the corresponding local limit. The argument is probabilistic and unified across the three quantities.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM Agents

Authors:
Xinbei Ma↗Jiyang Qiu↗Yao Yao↗Zheng Wu↗Yijie Lu↗Xiangmou Qu↗Jiaxin Yin↗Xingyu Lou↗Jun Wang↗Weiwen Liu↗Weinan Zhang↗Zhuosheng Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.14314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange. To investigate how agents should communicate across modalities, this paper formalizes Communication Policy, establishes textual and UI-based policies, and then evaluates communication policies across diverse environments, personas, and model combinations. Building information asymmetry for proactive agents, we set up two complementary settings, User-Agent and Planner-Executor. Experimental results reveal complementary strengths between interaction channels: text-based interaction often facilitates task performance, while structured UI improves agents' response quality and persona compliance. Motivated by that, a hybrid method combines these advantages. We further propose Communication Policy Evolution (CPE), a self-evolution framework for refining communication policies through rollout and prompt-level evolving. Without model modification, CPE achieves the best task success across multiple settings using prompt refinement alone. Our findings identify communication behavior as a critical yet underexplored design dimension for LLM agents.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

On-Manifold Variational Learning with Heat-Kernel Priors

Authors:
Jiarui Xing↗Tal Zeevi↗Nian Wu↗Jian Wang↗

Learning unsupervised representations of medical imaging cohorts can reveal clinically meaningful prototypes without expert labels, which are often noisy and fail to capture true pathological heterogeneity. However, existing deep latent-variable models estimate Gaussian mixture priors via Euclidean averaging, producing prototypes that drift off the curved data manifold and degenerate as the number of sub-populations grows. We propose a manifold-anchored variational framework built on a geometry-aware Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, whose M-step selects each sub-population prototype as the graph medoid with the highest diffusion centrality on a heat-kernel-weighted latent graph, ensuring that every prototype remains on-manifold. A Dirichlet energy regularizer enforces geometric smoothness of the latent space, and a per-sub-population uncertainty score enables label-free quality assessment. \rev{The manifold-anchored EM is a general-purpose geometric tool that extends standard EM and applies readily to other latent-variable models beyond this setting.} On cardiac scar and brain MRI benchmarks, our framework attains the highest accuracy among all compared methods, produces the sharpest prototypes reported to date, and remains stable at large sub-population counts where all baselines degenerate.

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12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Viability of engineered AAVs via protein language models

Authors:
Desrosiers↗Ocari↗Trinquier↗Zin↗E. A↗Van Meter↗Delmas↗Tekinsoy↗Planul↗Nemoto↗Dalkara↗Ferrari↗…

Capsid engineering has greatly improved the performance of recombinant AAV vectors used for gene therapy. One commonly used strategy is the insertion of a short, 7-mer, peptide into surface-exposed loops to modify receptor interactions and enhance cell entry. While effective in receptor retargeting and improved transduction, these insertions might destabilize the capsid protein, hinder assembly, and thus limit production. While previous attempts have used deep mutational scanning and AI to predict which insertions are viable, there is lack in understanding the structural consequences of these peptide insertions at the amino-acid level. Here we combined experiments, deep sequencing and large protein language models to gain insight on the impact of 7-mer insertions on the VR-VIII region. We first characterize the biochemical properties of viable insertions, thus identifying which residues are well tolerated, and which should instead be avoided. We then focus on the nearby context of those insertions, by studying the effect of the linkers, either for highly diverse libraries or for individual variants known for their efficiency. Next, we study the broader context, by extending our analysis to the whole capsid sequence, and identifying regions that can tolerate insertions without long-ranged structural deformations that could affect capsid functionality. We conclude with a cross-serotype comparison and a viability analysis of tens of previously engineered variants. Our work showcases how AI can uncover structure-function rules governing the success of engineered AAV capsids.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human Universal Grasping

Authors:
Kevin Yuanbo Wu↗Tianxing Zhou↗Isaac Tu↗Billy Yan↗Irmak Guzey↗David Fouhey↗Dandan Shan↗Lerrel Pinto↗

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Authors:
Sebastian Stapf↗Pablo Acuaviva Huertos↗Aram Davtyan↗Paolo Favaro↗

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

OpenVTON-Bench: A Large-Scale High-Resolution Benchmark for Controllable Virtual Try-On Evaluation

Authors:
Jin Li↗Tao Chen↗Kai Wen↗Siqi Yin↗Shuai Jiang↗Weijie Wang↗Jingwen Luo↗Chenhui Wu↗

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly elevated the visual fidelity of Virtual Try-On (VTON) systems, yet reliable evaluation remains a persistent bottleneck. Traditional metrics struggle to quantify fine-grained texture details and semantic consistency, while existing datasets fail to meet commercial standards in scale and diversity. We present OpenVTON-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising approximately 100K high-resolution image pairs (up to $1536 \times 1536$). The dataset is constructed using DINOv3-based hierarchical clustering for semantically balanced sampling and Gemini-powered dense captioning, ensuring a uniform distribution across 20 fine-grained garment categories. To support reliable evaluation, we propose a multi-modal protocol that measures VTON quality along five interpretable dimensions: background consistency, identity fidelity, texture fidelity, shape plausibility, and overall realism. The protocol integrates VLM-based semantic reasoning with a novel Multi-Scale Representation Metric based on SAM3 segmentation and morphological erosion, enabling the separation of boundary alignment errors from internal texture artifacts. Experimental results show strong agreement with human judgments (Kendall's $\tau$ of 0.833 vs. 0.611 for SSIM), establishing a robust benchmark for VTON evaluation.

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16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

LongSpike: Fractional Order Spiking State Space Models for Efficient Long Sequence Learning

Authors:
Xinrui He↗Qiyu Kang↗Xuhao Li↗Zheng-Jun Zha↗

arXiv:2606.12895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are well-regarded for their biological plausibility and energy efficiency in processing sequential data. However, dominant SNN architectures typically rely on first-order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) to govern neuronal state transitions. This first-order assumption imposes a "memoryless" bottleneck, limiting the model's capacity to capture the complex, long-range dependencies inherent in long-sequence tasks. In this work, we propose LongSpike, a novel SNN framework that integrates fractional-order State-Space Modeling, or f-SSM, from control theory into the spiking domain. By extending traditional integer-order SSMs to the fractional-calculus regime, LongSpike enables the hierarchical integration of neuronal dynamics with long-memory kernels. To mitigate the computational overhead and parallelization challenges typically associated with fractional operators, we leverage a state-space formulation that supports efficient, parallel training. Empirical evaluations on challenging benchmarks, including Long Range Arena (LRA), large-scale WikiText-103, and Speech Commands, demonstrate that LongSpike outperforms state-of-the-art SNNs in accuracy while preserving sparse synaptic computation. The code is available at https://github.com/xinruihe389-commits/LongSpike.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

Authors:
Qingyun Yang↗Jon S. Heiselman↗Ayberk Acar↗Morgan J. Ringel↗Michael I. Miga↗Matthieu Chabanas↗Michael C. Topf↗Jie Ying Wu↗

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Enteral docosahexaenoic and arachidonic acid supplementation and retinopathy of prematurity: a re-analysis of randomized controlled trials in preterm infants

Authors:
Sjoebom↗Pivodic↗Lundgren↗Moltu↗S. J↗Frost↗Robinson↗D. T↗Henriksen↗Hellstroem↗Nilsson↗A. K↗…

Background. A recent meta-analysis by Dang et al. [1] concluded that enteral supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), with or without arachidonic acid (ARA) did not significantly affect retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) outcomes in preterm infants. Of four eligible trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, only two contributed to each ROP outcome analyzed, and severe ROP was not assessed. Methods. We replicated the eligibility criteria and search strategy of Dang et al., restricted to trials that supplemented both DHA and ARA, and reanalyzed three ROP endpoints (any ROP, ROP requiring treatment, and severe ROP [stage 3 and/or treated]) using complete outcome records from all eligible trials. Crude risk ratios (RR) were pooled by Mantel-Haenszel fixed-effect meta-analysis. Gestational age-adjusted odds ratios (adjOR) were pooled on the log scale by inverse-variance random-effects meta-analysis with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimation of between-study variance and Hartung-Knapp confidence intervals. Results. Five trials were included; one trial was identified in our replicated search but was excluded by Dang et al. without a stated rationale. The pooled estimate for any ROP was consistent with Dang et al. (RR 0.87 [95% CI 0.71-1.08]; adjOR 0.70 [0.46-1.08]). For ROP requiring treatment, the crude RR suggested a lower risk but did not reach statistical significance (RR 0.60 [0.35-1.04]), whereas the gestational age-adjusted estimate indicated lower odds (adjOR 0.47 [0.23-0.94]). For severe ROP, DHA+ARA supplementation produced a significant protective effect in both unadjusted and adjusted models (RR 0.56 [0.36-0.86]; adjOR 0.42 [0.19-0.96]). Conclusions. When all eligible trials contribute to each endpoint and severe ROP is included as an outcome, enteral DHA+ARA supplementation reduces severe ROP and is associated with lower odds of ROP requiring treatment after adjustment for gestational age. These findings differ from the conclusions of Dang et al. and support reconsideration of DHA+ARA supplementation as a strategy to reduce sight-threatening ROP in preterm infants.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AI-Automation Tooling in Computer Engineering Education: Mixed-Methods TAM/UTAUT Evidence for a General Acceptance Attitude

Authors:
Aung Pyae↗

arXiv:2606.12424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As generative AI and low-code workflow platforms become routine in software practice, a key educational question is whether the next generation of computer engineers will accept these tools as useful, usable, and worthy of sustained engagement. This paper reports a mixed-methods, cross-sectional study of undergraduate computer engineering students' acceptance of AI automation tooling, instantiated through the open-source platform n8n across three identically scripted workshops in Thailand (n = 103). A 12-item, five-point Likert instrument mapped to six TAM/UTAUT constructs - Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Behavioral Intention (BI), Self-Efficacy (SE), Hedonic Motivation (HM), and Output Quality (OQ) - was complemented by inductive thematic analysis of open-ended feedback. Analyses combined ordinal reliability estimation, bootstrap confidence intervals, non-parametric tests, multiple-comparison-controlled correlations, polychoric dimensionality diagnostics, a common-method-bias check, and between-session comparisons. Acceptance was favorable across all six constructs with large effect sizes, with PE emerging as the strongest construct and HM as the weakest. Dimensionality diagnostics further revealed that canonical TAM/UTAUT sub-facets collapsed into a single general acceptance factor in this short-form post-workshop context, a finding with important methodological and theoretical implications. Qualitative themes converged with the quantitative profile regarding usefulness and enthusiasm but diverged on output quality, revealing a small yet articulate reliability-skeptical minority. The findings support the curricular adoption of AI automation tooling in undergraduate computing education and identify three theory-grounded instructional levers: instruction-sequencing scaffolds, self-efficacy supports, and trust-calibration interventions.

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20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:
Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

GenTrack: A New Generation of Multi-Object Tracking

Authors:
Toan Van Nguyen↗Rasmus G. K. Christiansen↗Dirk Kraft↗Leon Bodenhagen↗

This paper introduces a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) method, dubbed GenTrack, whose main contributions include: first-a hybrid tracking approach employing both stochastic and deterministic manners to robustly handle unknown and time-varying numbers of targets, particularly in maintaining target identity (ID) consistency and managing nonlinear dynamics, second-leveraging particle swarm optimization (PSO) with some proposed fitness measures to guide stochastic particles toward their target distribution modes, enabling effective tracking even with weak and noisy object detectors, third-integration of social interactions among targets to enhance PSO-guided particles as well as improve continuous updates of both strong (matched) and weak (unmatched) tracks, thereby reducing ID switches and track loss, especially during occlusions, fourth-a GenTrack-based redefined visual MOT baseline incorporating a comprehensive state and observation model based on space consistency, appearance, detection confidence, track penalties, and social scores for systematic and efficient target updates, and five-the first ever publicly available source-code reference implementation with minimal dependencies, featuring three variants, including GenTrack Simple, Strengthen, and Super, facilitating flexible reimplementation. Experimental results have shown that GenTrack provides superior performance on standard benchmarks and real-world scenarios compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with integrated implementations of baselines for fair comparison. Potential directions for future work are also discussed. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

Authors:
Valentin Lafargue↗Adriana Laurindo Monteiro↗Emmanuelle Claeys↗Laurent Risser↗Jean-Michel Loubes↗

arXiv:2507.20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing. For binary classifiers, regulatory risk assessment often relies on global fairness metrics such as the Disparate Impact ratio, widely used to evaluate potential discrimination. In typical auditing settings, the auditee provides a subset of its dataset to an auditor, while a supervisory authority may verify whether this subset is representative of the full underlying distribution. In this work, we investigate to what extent a malicious auditee can construct a fairness-compliant yet representative-looking sample from a non-compliant original distribution, thereby creating an illusion of fairness. We formalize this problem as a constrained distributional projection task and introduce mathematically grounded manipulation strategies based on entropic and optimal transport projections. These constructions characterize the minimal distributional shift required to satisfy fairness constraints. To counter such attacks, we formalize representativeness through distributional distance based statistical tests and systematically evaluate their ability to detect manipulated samples. Our analysis highlights the conditions under which fairness manipulation can remain statistically undetected and provides practical guidelines for strengthening supervisory verification. We validate our theoretical findings through experiments on standard tabular datasets for bias detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ValentinLafargue/Inspection.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes

Authors:
Zhi-Han Zhang↗Han-Chuan Kou↗Peng Li↗

arXiv:2606.13200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes (ICDZM) in the generalized Creutz ladders using closed quench paths that pass through two critical points successively. By reading out the final zero-mode transfer probability, we find rich ICDZM interference patterns dependent on the quench path. In particular, when the closed path links two topologically nontrivial phases, the ICDZM pattern may either vanish or exhibit period doubling. Within the framework of WKB analysis, this phenomenon is well clarified by the interference phase accumulated in the quench procedure. We also demonstrate that the zero-mode transfer probability can be detected by the deviation of the boundary particle number from its initial fractional value, which arises from the blending of bulk modes in the critical dynamics. As an edge defect, the zero-mode transfer probability captures both the ICDZM oscillation and the known anomalous defect production in a non-closed quench path. These results identify ICDZM and the corresponding edge defect as probes for critical dynamics associated with topological zero modes.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Poly-Social Risk for Hypertension Among Black and Latina Women

Authors:
Belak↗James↗Auguste↗Rana↗Eweka↗De Moor↗Sarma↗Ensing↗Economy↗K. E↗Powe↗C. E↗…

Background: Hypertension is a leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor prominently influenced by health-related social needs (HRSN). Whether detailed information on HRSN can improve identification of hypertension among minoritized women is unknown. Methods: Black and Latina women aged 18-65 years completed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Screening Tool, assessing 13 HRSN domains. Hypertension was ascertained by a validated EHR-based algorithm or self-report of hypertension. Logistic regression tested associations of HRSN with hypertension. LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation was used to derive a poly-social risk score in the training set (random 70%) and tested in the validation set (30%) against a sociodemographic model (age, race, income, education). Results: Among 1302 participants (mean [SD] age 40.1 [11.3] years, 70.4% Black, 44.3% Latina), higher cumulative burden of HRSN was associated with increased odds of hypertension (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] for each additional domain of HRSN: 1.07 [95% CI 1.01-1.14], P=0.02). Food insecurity (aOR 2.30 [1.37-3.87], P= 0.002), lapse in utilities (aOR 1.44 [1.04-1.96], P=0.02), poor concentration (aOR 1.57 [1.13-2.17], P=0.007), and social isolation (aOR 1.77 [1.14-2.73], P=0.01) were associated with hypertension. In the validation set, the poly-social risk score did not improve discrimination for hypertension vs. the sociodemographic model (AUC 0.76 [95% CI 0.71-0.81] vs. AUC 0.80 [0.75-0.85]). Conclusion: In this cross-sectional analysis of Black and Latina women, greater cumulative social disadvantage was associated with hypertension. While inclusion of HRSN did not improve hypertension prediction beyond conventional sociodemographic indices, findings may inform targeted interventions among minorities at cardiometabolic risk.

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